Training | Freakalytics™

Stephen Few versus David McCandless- we should leave playing doctor to the children

Here is my response to Nathan's article, "Business intelligence vs. infotainment", on Flowing Data. Nathan's article was in response to Stephen's earlier article on Perceptual Edge, "Teradata, David McCandless, and yet another detour for analytics".

We should leave “playing doctor” to the children

In considering this great debate, perhaps we should step back and consider another field, medicine. For centuries, medicine was guided by wishes, fantasy and misguided ideas of what would heal people. One of my favorite examples is "trephining" (drilling holes in your head) to release the evil spirits that have made the patient ill. Of course, for a very small percent of patients, this proved helpful. However, most ended up no better and typically much worse for their procedure.

I feel that McCandless work is "fun" and vibrant, but

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Examining data over time, part 1- Netflix stock price history presented 7 ways

It is fascinating how much information you can uncover with just a few years of price data in Tableau. In this example, we use just two data items to examine the history of Netflix stock price (NASDAQ NFLX.) The data items used are date and closing price, adjusted for splits.

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Rapid Graphs with Tableau 6 – Kindle, Amazon or CreateSpace

A complimentary preview of the 1st two chapters, the table of contents and the book index is available for download here.

NOTE- the book is now available at Amazon, after correcting logistical issues.

Rapid Graphs with Tableau Software 6 is now available for purchase on Amazon in print and in e-book format for Kindle readers - on the Kindle device, PC, Mac, iPad and iPhone! Note that the print version has slightly better layout and readability due to the graphic-intensive nature of this book and the automated layout of e-book readers. This e-book is published in color for Kindle users on the PC, Mac, iPad and iPhone. Kindle device readers may have difficulty interpreting some of the graphs due to the native black and white reading experience.

This update from the 1st version of the book required changes across nearly every page and significantly expanded the size of the book with coverage of many new features added- both from Tableau 6 and earlier releases. Other additions include an index and expanded examples in several chapters.

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Marimekko charts and an interactive alternative for a broad audience

A Marimekko chart created in Tableau by Joe Mako, inspired by Jon Peltier

Joe Mako recently created a Tableau version of a Marimekko chart inspired by an example from Jon Peltier, an Excel charting expert.

When I first saw this chart, I was curious as to the utility of this chart type for regular business decision-makers. I agree that for advanced analysts, it can offer a compact, contained means to present information across two categorical items (dimensions in Tableau) and metric (a measure in Tableau.) You can see this in the Marimekko chart created by Joe Mako in the left half of the dashboard below. When you examine the Marimekko chart you can see the dominant cities and the relative share of each segment within each city. You can also select the city names above the view to highlight a specific city. For example, you can easily discern that Almond Lovers are the biggest group of customers for this company and Delicious-n-new are the smallest group.

However, it is somewhat challenging to ascertain within Gainesville, FL which segment is the largest and smallest for this city. If you hover over each Gainesville, FL value in the original chart, you will see that two segments are identical in size; this is very hard to see without the hover values. This is due to the varying width and length dimensions for each tile in the chart.

After considering this interesting example,

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Why attend in-person Complete Tableau training by Freakalytics?

Everyone is busy and overloaded. People find it hard to add new techniques and tools into their daily work due to extensive demands in almost every level of every company. People are trying to do more with less, faster and better!

Why should you take off four valuable days to attend Tableau training by Freakalytics?

We were fortunate to have a distinguished attendee recently write-up her four-day training experience. Susan Kistler is Executive Director of the American Evaluation Association, an organization dedicated to assessing the strengths and weaknesses of programs, policies, personnel, products, and organizations to improve their effectiveness. AEA has approximately 5500 members representing all 50 states in the US as well as over 60 foreign countries.

Here is part of her review:

“There is no substitute for learning at the feet of a master. And I’m not just saying this because I coordinate training for AEA. I’d been using Tableau Software for months.

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